Review of Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

Charles Taylor. Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024, 640 pages, £31.95.

In his most recent book Cosmic Connections the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor explores Romantic and post-Romantic poetry as a response to disenchantment. He specifically looks at how certain poets describe a connection with the cosmos.

Taylor starts his book with a philosophical introduction in which he lays out his thesis. According to Taylor, in the premodern world connection with the cosmos was based on a structured order like the Platonic forms, Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, or the Kabbalah. From the seventeenth century onwards, belief in those old orders slowly disappeared under the influence of Galilean-Newtonian natural science. Man is left disconnected from the surrounding world which he cannot properly access.

Enter the German Romantics with their renewed appreciation for the symbolic. For them a reconnection to the cosmos is possible via the symbolic access which art offers us, be that myth, poetry, or music. Symbolic art cannot give us an empirical description of the links in the cosmos, but it does present those links in a way which moves the reader, thus bringing about a (re)connection to the cosmos. As Taylor writes: ‘Philosophy can perhaps tell you how things relate, but only Dichtung, Poetry, Poesie . . . can recover relation’.¹

Taylor dedicates a whole chapter to dealing with the ‘epistemic retreat’ that is part and parcel of this Romantic view of poetry. Unlike the poetry of John Milton or George Herbert, which explicitly refers to the ‘underlying story’ (i.e. Christian sources) the poet is drawing from, the Romantics make no metaphysical claims, and their references to deities do not refer to actually existing gods. However, Taylor attacks the widely-held view that Romantic poetry’s description of (re)connection is thus merely a reflection of the psychological condition of the poet, since this completely ignores the phenomenological experience of the author who truly feels a unity between himself and the cosmos. Instead, Taylor argues that the Romantics and their successors evoke an ‘interspace’ between the ‘ontological’ and ‘psychological’, where a sense of reconnection is described and created for the reader.

This general thesis (described in the first 100 pages or so) is then worked out in the rest of the book, which consists of readings of several Romantic and post-Romantic poets, from German Romantics like Friedrich Hölderlin and Novalis via Gerald Manley Hopkins and Rainer Maria Rilke to the French Symbolists Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Large parts of these poets’ works are inserted in their original German or French with an English translation. It is a pity that Taylor does not often engage with up-to-date scholarly research on the poets he discusses. Taylor’s argument could have been strengthened if he had engaged more with recent research on the Romantic view of nature in Novalis for example,² but Taylor only engages with the poet himself, with his footnotes merely referring to Novalis’s own work. Taylor also rarely does thorough close readings; he often presents a poem from which he extracts one or two ideas that illustrate his philosophical thesis on (re)connection.

Charles Taylor is a philosopher, not a literary scholar, and it will most likely be the educated literary scholar who will be more critical of the book due to these superficial poetry readings. Certainly the philosophical introduction and interludes are much more convincing than Taylor’s poetry analysis. In this imbalance between two different disciplines, I found the book to be a perfect example of some of the difficulties researchers at the intersection between theology and the arts often run into: most are merely good theologians or philosophers who dabble in aesthetics like Charles Taylor himself, or excellent students of the arts with but a rudimentary knowledge of theology and philosophy. The real jack-of-all-trades is rare, and there is a real danger of ending up the master of none.

One other criticism of Cosmic Connections is the messy layout. The chapter on Baudelaire shifts the topic slightly from cosmic connections to connections in time, and after using this paradigm to analyse the works of T. S. Eliot and Czeslaw Milosz, Taylor sidetracks into a chapter on the history of ethical growth. When we finally make it to the last chapter titled “Cosmic Connection Today — and Perennially” the reader is reminded of the initial thesis on cosmic connections, a discussion Taylor seems to have left behind 200 pages ago. At 640 pages, the book takes a good while to get through, and having a more rigorous editor to cut out a few bits would have made Taylor’s case stronger. In general, the book has a slightly unfinished air about it, with Taylor explicitly admitting at the end of his chapter on Mallarmé (undoubtedly his most floundering) that he hasn’t quite yet unravelled him.

Charles Taylor is a Roman Catholic philosopher, but he scrupulously avoids entering into theological territory in Cosmic Connections. He even includes an explanatory note in the book on the distinction between the Romantic experience of cosmic connection and the visionary experiences which are classified as religious, arguing that the Romantic experience doesn’t require the author or reader to change his life in the radical way a more straightforward religious experience does. Nevertheless, his book deliberately leaves space for a further encounter between theology and poetry, with Taylor defending a view of cosmic connection which could include religious encounter, although it doesn’t necessarily imply it. In this way Cosmic Connections can be a helpful book for all those working at the intersection between philosophy, theology, and the arts. Following T. S. Eliot: ‘There are only hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses; . . . The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation’.³